Businesses constantly need to inform potential customers of the goods it has for sale or goods it has in stock for use by its various divisions. This need has been met in the past by publishing a printed catalog of the goods. Conventional publication of catalogs requires special skills in graphic design and layout. In the past these skills were carried out by hand by highly trained specialists. Computer programs have been developed to remove some of the handwork from graphic design but they still require a design specialist trained in graphic layout and the specific program being used or a technically skilled programmer. Trained specialists may still take as much as about two hours to prepare one page of a catalog for publication. This obviously adds a significant cost to publishing a catalog. Thus, while conventional publishing programs eased the manual burdens on the specialist they have not provided a means for a nonspecialist to produce a professional looking catalog.
Printed catalogs also have the draw back that they are expensive to produce, print and update. Paper is expensive. The overhead of professional printers is quite large. Some companies rely on a single printed catalog for at least one year or more. Printing an entire year's supply of catalogs requires professional high speed printing machinery. Such a catalog may quickly become out-of-date by listing products which are no longer carried, by not listing products that are carried, or by listing incorrect information about a product, e.g., changed specifications or price. Companies may lose sales if a customer does not find a product in the printed catalog or sees incorrect, outdated information, such as product specifications or price, in the printed catalog.
Compact disks, i.e., CD-ROMs, have become a widely used format for storing data due in part to their proliferation into personal computers (PC's). It is believed that most PC's sold in the past few years include a standard CD-ROM drive. CD-ROMs are also desirable due to their storage capacity, reliability and ease of use. CD-ROMs can store a large catalog on a single disk, which currently costs about one dollar or less. In contrast, printed paper catalogs cost from about $10.00 to $70.00. Moreover, due to the relatively small size of CD-ROMs relative to large catalogs there is considerable postage savings when catalogs are stored on CD-ROMs.
Computer networks, such as the Internet, have become a tremendous information resource tool used by many companies and its customers. Even more, the Internet is a powerful agent which is transforming the way nearly every product and service is sold or provided. With countless internet service providers proliferating at an extremely rapid rate, the competition to develop consumer loyalty and hold the consumer's attention for repeat business is critical. Service and accessibility is also critical. Thus, there is a need for a current and up-to-date presence on the Internet.
Consequently, there remains a need to provide improved systems and methods for producing catalogs that allow a business to produce its own catalog at a reduced cost relative to conventional catalog publishing. The systems and methods must be relatively easy for a person, not having specialized publishing training, within the business to produce the catalog. Moreover, there is a need to provide catalog publication software that does not require special hardware which would not be found in a typical office or which would require specialized publishing training.
There is also a need in businesses that use catalogs to inform customers of its products to publish its catalog in multiple mediums. Different customers may prefer or require catalogs or information from the catalog in different formats, e.g., print, electronic, machine-readable storage. However, conventional catalog publishers do not provide catalogs that are readily adaptable to multiple formats even if multiple formats happen to be offered. Moreover, conventional methods for producing catalogs in multiple formats require a plurality of different data formats.
Many marketers produce catalogs to inform customers of the products that the marketer offers. However, due to the cost of producing a catalog usually only a single catalog of the marketer's products is published. This restricts the ability of the marketer from targeting specific customers. For example, certain customers may only be interested in a certain sub-group of products offered by the marketer. The customer may find it difficult to find the specific products that he is interested in a large, general catalog. Moreover, a marketer may be restricted in how often it can publish a catalog, thereby restricting seasonal promotions. Customers today are becoming accustomed to accurate, current and prompt product information, such as price, discounts, etc. Consequently, a marketer must provide such information. Accordingly, there is a need to easily produce targeted catalogs within an economical budget.